Pokémon often gets by with this, especially whenever the Olympus Mons make the scene. The movies in particular are all about showcasing massive battles between some of the most powerful creatures from the games, whatever the rest of the plot might be about. The newest one makes a point of advertising that the original legendary Mewtwo shows up to face the latest, Genesect.

There's a mini-arc of Gold Digger in which a princess and her spec ops team pilot an ersatzVoltron against a group of pirates and their GaoGaiGar lookalike. The fight lasts three issues and includes triple-wielded katanas, evil twins, and a guitar riff that can stop time. Did I mention that all of the characters involved are leprechauns?

Deadpool tended towards this for a while, especially after he teamed up with his own zombie-universe severed head to fight dinosaurs, some of which became zombies, and then later were infected by the Venom symbiote. He also helped a superhero trucker fight alien raccoons, and helped Hercules solve a labyrinth created by Arcade, who was hired by a demon.

When confronted by samuroids, samurai androids, Elsa Bloodstone fights them with a shovel, saying they're too cool for her to use guns on.

Worlds Collide is a Crossover comic between Sonic and Mega Man, first pitting the titular heroes against each other, then against Doctors Eggman and Wily as they fight to prevent the two mad scientists from rewriting their realities.

Hilariously lampooned in New Warriors, where the titular team was captured by a trio of highly sentient primates (a gorilla, a baboon, and an orangutan). Speedball, who had spent most of the previous few issues bothering his teammates with questions like would a shark be able to beat a crocodile, immediately begins asking the gorilla and the baboon who, in their opinion, would win in fights between a hyena and a leopard, a bear versus a rhino, etc. Both the apes are in complete agreement over who the victor in each fight would be, although they make a point of informing Speedball that such scenarios could never happen in real life. Finally, Speedball asks who would win in a fight between a gorilla and a baboon. The gorilla insists that the gorilla would win, the baboon insists that it would be the baboon. Both of them immediately begin fighting, giving the New Warriors the opportunity they need to escape, which was Speedball's plan all along.

Dungeon Keeper Ami features a sizeable undead fleet in the opening stages of the battle of Dreadfog Island. Flying undead galleons and frigats, supported by twelve ancient death priests, pitted against airships. And then a giant flying zombie Octopus...

The Godzilla franchise mostly deals with the titled mutant dinosaur himself fighting off other giant monsters and super weapons such as other giant mutant dinosaurs, bugs, dragons, gods, space monster, robots and cyborgs.

There's also the sequels Mega Shark Vs. Crocosaurus and Mega Shark Vs. Mecha Shark, as well as the unrelated Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid. Apparently, The Asylum has a thing for creature features when they're not busy ripping off currently popular movies.

Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 features the ultimate underwater battle... zombie versus shark! The undeath-or-death duel ends in a draw: the zombie's missing an arm, but the wounded tiger shark swims away, where he presumably goes Up to Eleven by becoming an offscreen zombie shark.

Pathfinder: Native Americans vs. Vikings. Bonus points for having actually happened in Real Life — the Vikings reached America almost five hundred years before Columbus, and even tried to colonize Newfoundland, but were driven out by the natives.

A hundred points to wizard Harry Dresden, arriving in style for the battle against necromancers and their zombie armies at the climax of Dead Beat. Now, the Fifth Law of Magic prohibits raising the dead, but Harry notes this only applies to raising human dead. Another rule of magic is that when animating a corpse, the older it is, the stronger. So Dresden animated Sue, a nearly-complete dinosaur fossil over sixty-five million years old. Or in other words, Harry rode into battle on a zombified Tyrannosaurus rex. Set to jaunty polka music.

Changes has an epic battle. Involves three vampires, The Fair Folk, a Knight of the Cross or three, dozens of wizards (including the new Winter Knight and the Blackstaff), a Chinese guardian spirit, an entire army of Japanese kenku ninja-spirits, and Odin versus the entire Red Court of vampires, including the Red King, armies of half-vampire acolytes, and the Lords of the Outer Night, more or less Mayincatec gods, and South American mercenaries.

Everworld; not only do you have gods from various mythologies versus each other, but you also have: Vikings vs Aztecs, Vikings vs medieval knights (plus Merlin himself), Ancient Greek gods vs insect-aliens, etc.

Although they did skirt the obvious by having the pirate fight a knight and the ninja fight a Spartan, likely to avoid trolling.

The guy who programs the simulations actually said that they were avoiding it because no one would agree on the right way to test it, and no one on the losing side would accept the result anyway (not that the series isn't already a tremendous Base Breaker).

A similar concept was used a couple of times on the teen show, Dude, What Would Happen?, albeit with cheap prop duels rather than computer simulations. Once they even did "Vikings vs. Pirates", meaning northmen pirates against caribbean pirates.

Top Gear delights in pitting one Cool Car against another, but it has also featured Cool Car v. Cool Boat (Ferrari Daytona v. a brand new carbon-fiber superboat) and Cool Car v. Cool Plane (Bugatti Veyron v. RAF Eurofighter Typhoon. And perhaps the ultimate: Cool Car vs. Cool Bike vs. Cool Train. And all of them 60 year old designs.

In the second episode of Sleepy Hollow's second season, Abby and Ichabod conjure up a horseman of their own who immediately takes on the Horsemen of Death and War simultaneously. It is technically this trope because War participates via a mind-controlled suit of armor.

Music

Back Through Time by Alestorm has pirates going back in time to fight vikings. They also mention having fought ninja in passing.

Professional Wrestling in general is built around this trope, combining sport rivalries with various gimmicks, from superheroes to delinquents to supernatural figures, to utterly crazy people, sometimes mixed with various additional rules, be it Mêlée à Trois, fight in a cage or lumberjack match.

In the WWN, this was the initial marketing idea behind EVOLVE, hence the abundance of versus titles. EVOLVE also set up the first SHINE main event of Sara Del Rey vs Jazz.

Sabu went down south to attend a Pro Wrestling Syndicate event in 2013 when he learned it would be feature John Morrison would be wrestling Jushin Thunder Liger. The sight of Sabu had fans chanting "Triple Threat" but they'd have to wait for that.

The original Dungeon Master's Guide included rules for running crossover battles between D&D heroes and characters from other early TSR games, including Boot Hill (Wild West gunslingers) and Gamma World (post-apocalyptic mutants).

Feng Shui features this a lot, given its timehopping Secret War setting. Shaolin monks battle evil cyborg demons from the future, transformed animals fight evil sorcerers that can turn them back into their regular animal form, maverick cops and heroic triad gangsters fight intelligent cyborg apes and their minions who like to BLOW THINGS UP. And that's just for starters.

As one person said, "Exalted is robots versus dinosaurs!" More aptly, it's glorious golden demigods and keepers of the earth, shapeshifting social engineers, a magically-empowered martial dynastic empire and fate's ninjas versus the undead servants of oblivion, mad fairies from beyond reality, demon-kings who gain power from acting like B-movie villains, Communist cyborg soldiers from another dimension, and each other.

Smash-Up is built on this trope. Players choose two "factions" from eight - including Pirates, Ninjas, Dinosaurs, Wizards, Robots, Zombies, Aliens, and Tricksters - shuffle those two factions together, and compete with the other factions to destroy buildings and landmarks. Get ready for Dinosaurs and Ninjas versus Aliens and Pirates!

When you get tier 3, you can start to pump out really awesome stuff like dual barreled tanks with rocket launchers, alien tripods with EMP and triple lasers and stealth robots armed with dual lasers and flamethrowers.

The Empire of the Rising Sun, with samurai foot-soldiers with laser-katanas, ninjas, hyperactive teenage girls in flying rocket suits, a girl with psychic powers, and more mecha than you can shake a stick at.

Guilty Gear and BlazBlue. The former has pirates (in a raincoat or sailor-fuku), police (that're dressed in something like priest clothes), assassins, an American Ninja and a whole lot more. The latter has what is essentially the Joker as a Smooth Criminal, cat-people, cyborgs, vampires, a Mad Scientist, and more.

The player can become a vampire or werewolf, and you fight dragons. There's also ninja assassins, wizards, demons, shadowy goblin-like elves, evil Nazi elves, and giant dwarven robots. You can even fight mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and giants!

Super Smash Bros. Brawl finally lets fans of the "16-bit" generation of consoles pit Mario and Sonic against each other.

The 3DS and Wii U iterations have paved the way for a full-on cross-company battle royale: Sonic returns, and is joined by Capcom's Mega Man and Namco's Pac-Man! And that's before even delving into the possibilities Mii Fighters open up...

Mass Effect combines the three Super Smash Bros examples above, and the plot centers around alien vs. robot fights. One of the coolest in-game combinations comes in 3, where the heroes summon a gigantic Thresher Maw (that is, gigantic by Thresher Maw standards) to fight a Reaper. The Thresher Maw wins.

3 also has references to a Reaper-aligned infantry vs. krogan cavalry battle. To elaborate: the Reaper infantry are murderous cyborg zombies who make the Borg of Star Trek seem gentle. Krogans are one of the most badass races in the galaxy, capable of enduring virtually any kind of punishment and surviving, whose idea of a coming of age ritual involves fighting their planet's most brutal wildlife, up to and including going five minutes in the ring with a Thresher Maw. Also, for this battle, they are riding cloned dinosaurs. That sound you just heard was your soul exploding from pure awesome.

In the final battle hundreds of kilometer-long mecha-Cthulhu versus a fleet of thousands of cool starships representing basically the entire galaxy's combat forces. And that's just the space battle.

One of the main attractions of the Total War series, especially Rome, Medieval and Empire. In a historical-based Real Time Strategy game, irregular wars that never historically happened do break out with alarming frequency. Spanish conquistadors holding the line against Mongolian horse-archer raiders? That can happen. The Independence-era United States attempting to conquer, or being conquered by, the peoples of the Indian subcontinent? Can happen. Viking warriors invading Aztec Mesoamerica? Possible. Carthage conquering Rome and moving north to fight the Celts? Plausible. Scottish highlanders storming Cairo? ... Has been done already, but the point still stands.

The Mount & Blade series shares much of the same appeal as mentioned in the Total War entry above, and while it's watered down a little since they're from Fantasy Counterpart Cultures, that's mitigated by the fact that the player can actively fight alongside them. Want to lead hordes of deadly steppe-raised horse archers against Viking-esque Sea Raiders (or vice-versa)? It's doable.

In Bioshock Infinite, both the Founders as the Vox Populi make heavy use of Motorized Patriots, basically the 1912 variant of the Terminator, as Elite Mooks. There are times when you can summon one of the Founders to counter those of the Vox Populi, resulting in a giant motorized Abraham Lincoln (the Vox) and George Washington (the Founders) duking it out in the streets, spouting lines as "Blood... is the price... for liberty!" or "The Lord judges. I act." while emptying their miniguns at each other.

The Burial at Sea DLC lets us pit the aforementioned Motorized Patriot against the mascot character of BioShock 1, the Big Daddy. The winner? Turns out a bunch of metal and plaster is no match for a gene-spliced cyborg with a drill hand. On the other hand, a Tear-summoned Samurai can hold out pretty well against Splicers.

Age of Mythology throws Classical Mythology, Egyptian Mythology and Norse Mythology into a Mêlée à Trois. Armies of Greek hoplites backed up by centaurs and minotaur heavies, up against Egyptian footsoldiers with sphinxes, mummies and giant scarab beetles, taking on Viking warriors fighting alongside trolls, valkyries and wolves. The expansion adds Atlantis as a civilization, and the Titans; massive super-units capable of devastating whole armies single-handedly note The Greeks get the three-headed dog Cerberus, the Egyptians get the god of vengeance Horus, the Norse get the gigantic frost giant Ymir, and the Atlanteans get Chthonian, a lava giant covered by crystals spikes sprouting from various parts of its body..

Civilization: Beyond Earth is shaping out for this with its Affinity system, which defines how your faction progresses "down" the "tech web" in order to adapt to the alien planet they're on, while building a Badass Army in the meantime:

The Adventures of Dr. McNinja has had, in no particular order, ninjas and a doctor ninja versus... robots, clowns, a flying bodybuilder, a giant Paul Bunyan who was really a child, evil ninjas, pirates, ghosts, Mexican banditos on dinosaurs, vampires, zombies, a unicorn motorcycle, a ghost wizard, someone pretending to be a robot, ninja zombies, more robots, zombie Benjamin Franklin, Dracula (Dracula also had a robot Dracula), a Danish 80s action movie hero and his ninjas, clone ninjas, ghost wizards, Mayincatec robot temple guards, future dinosaurs from space, a vengeful space ghost that explodes people, a samurai demon, sky pirates, a luchador doctor, and a king on a dirtbike. At any given point, those enemies may have fought each other as well.

Axe Cop has had the title character and his allies (including dinosaurs, people with unicorn horns, a vampire wizard ninja and his brother who's also a werewolf) vs. aliens, vampire half-babies, Humongous Mecha, flying books, Bad Santa... This picture◊ with just about all the good guys and antagonists on opposing sides, with huge amounts of Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot in both, takes the trope about as far as is imaginable.

Ethan Nicolle's other webcomic (besides Axe Cop), Bearmageddon, opens up with a character asking another who would win in a fight, a bear or a gorilla. They decide that it's an unanswerable question, like "can God make a square circle".

The Dragon Doctors is about magical doctors of many different disciplines who have banded together, and they've fought against various equally unusual opponents. The docs themselves are a wizard (with healing and shapeshifting magic), a soldier/surgeon, a shaman/therapist, and a Magitek specialist. They've faced off against a horde of assassins, a serial killer who kills dreaming shamans, and Goro (the soldier/surgeon) is currently fending off an all-female Quirky Miniboss Squad consisting of a pistol-wielding shapeshifter, a mage in a ballcap, a female ogre and a lamia with a petrifying ray gun.

Narbonic: "Who would win in a fight between a giant robot foot accompanied by a rifle-toting assassin, and an army of hamsters in mechanical suits?"

Homestuck has Bro (a Crazy Awesome, katana-wielding Badass who flies around on a rocket-powered surfboard) versus Jack Noir (a noir-themed Humanoid Abomination with godlike powers who also wields a katana and is part dog). The resulting battle is so awesome that it ends in a tie, with the two fighting to a standstill. Jack later gets the upper hand and kills Bro but only thanks to a well timed power-up gained from Becquerel prototyping himself.

A LEGO line called Ninjago pits heroic ninjas (with cool tornado powers in tv spots) against armored skeletons that ride motorcycle-like vehicles. Later the ninjas battle Snake People and utilize Humongous Mecha. One episode of the tv show has them fight undeadPirates.

"Frost and Fire" is devoted to the idea "what if Ice King and Flame Princess fought?" They fight three times; Flame Princess wins the first fight, Ice King wins the second and then Flame Princess curbs stomps Ice King in the third to the point of destroying the Ice Kingdom and almost killing him.

Archer: Invoked by Bionic Barry in Space Race. He offers to let Archer wear the space station's Alien style power loader suit to goad him into leaving his escape shuttle for a fight.

Older Than Feudalism: The Battle of Zama. A climactic battle between two of the mightiest empires in history commanded by the two greatest generals of the Sword And Sandal era. On the Carthaginian side is the Magnetic Hero, Hannibal Barca. On the Roman side is the Cincinnatus type Scipio Africanus. Who will win? Rome. To put the Battle of Zama into perspective, you have Roman legions being led by an eccentric general who really should not have this position under normal circumstances versus the aforementioned Magnetic Hero leading a diverse mercenary army and War Elephants. By all accounts it was epic.

Tennis rivalries - and sports rivalries in general - pretty much run on this trope. Federer vs. Nadal in the present and Sampras vs. Agassi in the past are examples. The 2007 and 2008 Wimbledon Men Singles Championship matches were noted for featuring the two players in their prime fighting tooth and nail for every point.

Battle of Hampton Roads, American Civil War. In the Grey Corner weighing in at 4000 long tons, the mighty casemate ironclad, and undefeated March 8th champion, The CSS Virginia! In the Blue Corner, displacing a tidy 987 long tons, all the way from New York, the raft body turret ship, USS Monitor! FIGHT!

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy